The Eastern Pulaski School Corporation will replace the public address and bell system at the middle school and high school. The school board Monday approved the purchase of a new intercom system from Fairchild Communication Systems for a cost of just over $33,000.
Superintendent Dan Foster said the current system has started having some problems. “It’s intermittent,” he explained. “It works. Then it doesn’t work, and they go down, they flip the switch, and wait up to 20 minutes sometimes and as little as five minutes sometimes, and flip it back on and it works. But it’s just very intermittent now, and if you get in it to call this room, it may call this room over here. So there’s some things going on.”
He explained that a company called Presidio had offered a cheaper option that would use the schools’ existing phone system, but its features were more limited. “Obviously, the con side of that, if the phones are out, if the Internet’s out, we don’t have any public address at all,” he said. “We can’t call rooms, we can’t do an all-call. We’re stuck. So keeping that in mind, we got the quote from Fairchild for their system, which is basically replacing what we have as-is, except it will be working correctly.”
Foster said the Fairchild system will continue to allow rooms to be called individually, in situations where using the phone isn’t convenient. The school board also approved a couple extra options, such as a battery backup system and second shift installation, to avoid the need to test the new system during school hours.
Foster added that a new public address system was considered as part of recent renovation work, but school officials decided to hold off, since the current system wasn’t having any problems at that point.
